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Comment by kez | Hacker News Reader

Good to see such a considered approach in this day and age.

In my eyes, there could be no TextMate 2, and I wouldn't complain. It is such a sturdy, reliable piece of software (with comparatively little in the same league), that it seems unlikely to experience a Quicksilver-esque exodus (although that was dead, not just on the slow burn).

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I would not consider this a "considered approach." He's doing a multi-year, ground-up rewrite of a highly successful product in order to add a list of features geared towards Textmate developers (of which there are roughly 1), rather than end-users.

Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!"

This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection.

What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.

Like most modern editors and IDEs, TextMate's power comes from the community of developers who extend the "out of the box" functionality.

To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical.

Otherwise, it's hard to disagree that this project is embarrassingly behind schedule. I read once that the first version was only released after numerous ground-up rewrites.

> To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical.

compay means "developer of the application itself" not "developers who use the app."

Yeah, but as the previous poster said: the biggest advantage of TM is the ecosystem of plugins and environments that third-parties have developed for it. From the dev blog posts, it sounds like a lot of the stuff going into TM2 will be directly useful for people developing plugins and what-not; ergo, it's stuff that will ultimately be end-user facing. Ditto for some of the other things that the dev has been talking about (better threading support, better support for network-mounted files, etc.).

Really, though, TM1 consistently amazes me in that I don't know too many other five-year-old programs that are still as useful today as they were when they were first released.

What I consider more critical than features geared toward devs is that TextMate works as a text editor. I've been using TextMate mostly happily for years, and half of me wants to tell Allan to keep on doing what he's doing if he thinks he will get a better TM 2.0 out of it.

The other half of me is pissed off that 1.x has issues that haven't been fixed because 2.x was supposed to fix it, and while I know I don't have a right to bitch and moan and demand this, it's still frustrating. Like how non-fixed-width text does not display correctly (in this text editor). Allan had a blog post back in 2006 about how to fake CJK support and promised 2.0's ground-up rewrite with Core Text was going to solve those issues. 2006. It was also part of a series of posts about how his app was going to go Leopard-only back then, and I'm now just sitting here wondering if I'm seeing a reenaction of Duke Nukem Forever where he's doing re-re-rewrites of 2.0 because of Leopard and now Snow Leopard and...

> Good to see such a considered approach in this day and age.

Since when is holing up for multiple years to work on your commercial project with little outside communication a "considered approach"?

> In my eyes, there could be no TextMate 2, and I wouldn't complain. It is such a sturdy, reliable piece of software [...]

It's both of those things, but that doesn't mean the 1.x branch doesn't have gigantic issues. My personal gripe is that when you focus a project window, the entire project is rescanned from disk for changes. When the files live on a WAN-mounted network share, this makes it unusable.

I stick with TextMate when I can because it's a very good Mac OS X editor, but Vim and Emacs make inroads every day.

Re: the full-project rescan (a nightmare when using TextMate with ExpanDrive), ReMate is your friend: http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/

Glad someone pointed it out, I use ReMate whenever I can. It's no good for projects in heavy development though. I've had co-workers do `git pull` with ReMate active. None of the updated files appear in TM, which makes it easy to save and commit a regressed file.

You have bigger problems if your coworkers don't look at what they're committing...

"git add -p" is your friend!

Quicksilver is dead?? I still use it every day. Where did people go? :-/

Leopard changed added app launching functionality to Spotlight, which is certainly why I stopped using it.

Actually its not dead, just the developer (Nicholas Jitkoff) stopped developing it but did make it opensource: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/blacktree-quicksilver

Jitkoff works at Google and went on to produce QS "clones" called Google Desktop & Google Quick Search Box: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-qui...

I'm still using the original non-opensource QS here with no problems (well at least no probs on Tiger!).

I've trying Google QSB; it is super fast, looks great, and works more like QS than LaunchBar. It is supposedly extensible, so hopefully people develop for it.

I went to LaunchBar http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

It's not really a fair comparison. Apple essentially built Quicksilver into the OS starting with 10.5 in the form of Spotlight.

No, Quicksilver has much more to offer than app launching. It's sad that most people never got past this. :-/

It's sadder that they never got past that due to it crashing continuously. It was a wonderful tool, but nobody I know ever experienced it as a reliable one. Tell me you don't know the disruptive experience of Cmd-Space and...nothing happens. It's like having your leg fall off mid-stride.

I use Quicksilver as my sole means of launching applications (plus a few other utility functions) and I've never experienced the kind of instability you're describing. Let ß56a7's low PID testify to it's rock solidness!

  ~ bgilmore → uptime
  12:35  up 23 days, 56 mins, 5 users, load averages: 0.22 0.19 0.21
  ~ bgilmore → ps ax | grep Quick
    149   ??  S      1:31.43 /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver -psn_0_36873

In all seriousness, though, I can imagine the irritation that would be caused by crashes. I've just never experienced them, and I've been on the Quicksilver train since 10.4.1 or so.

(I'm a ⌃Space guy myself)

After the third or fourth crash I added a launchd item to restart Quicksilver whenever it crashes.

I never even notice the crashes any more, and when it starts acting funny I can Cmd+Q it and it will be freshly restarted in a few seconds.

Have you tried searching in a big project? Blocks the main thread and you're stuck waiting until your memory fills up completely.

Have you tried nice_find?

http://github.com/briancollins/nice_find

It's a plugin, not a bundle (like Ack In Project) so it feels native, it is asynchronous, and it uses git-grep when available. I love it.

I love you.

Ack in Project to the rescue:

http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle

Sure, it's not the native find in project, but it's way faster. Not a day goes by that I don't use it.

I run into that all the time. Even opening a big file takes TM to its knees. I keep TextWrangler on the Dock for when I need to open big files or search large projects.

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